40. Zyran
ZYRAN
The house smells like coffee when I walk in.
Dropping my keys on the entryway table, I stand there for a split second, hanging my head back.
It’s quiet here; it usually is unless Sybil is in a mood and wrecking havoc for everyone.
But somehow it’s a different kind of quiet than in Esperr’s apartment.
And I find myself feeling weird and sort of out of place here.
I take a deep breath and step forward, moving towards the kitchen.
Rhys is already there, standing at the counter with his back to me, waiting on the coffee that’s brewing.
I’m pretty sure he’s still in the same set of clothes he had on yesterday.
His hair is doing that thing that suggests he’s been running his fingers through it in an anxious sort of way.
He doesn’t turn around when I walk in, or when I lean against the doorframe, or when I know he can feel my eyes burning a hole into the back of his head.
Rhys always knows; he never misses anything, just chooses what to acknowledge, but he keeps his eyes on the coffee maker like it’s the most interesting thing in the room.
I cross my arms over my chest and wait for the coffee maker to finish up and then for him to pour himself a cup. And yet the fucker still has yet to turn around.
The silence between us stretches to a point that it grinds every nerve in my head. The sipping of his coffee, the slurping sound he makes. I’m two seconds away from breaking his jaw.
“Rhys!” I snapped.
His back tenses for a moment before he turns around slowly, almost like I’ve interrupted something important.
He leans back against the counter, coffee in one hand, and looks at me with that expression he’s had since we were kids—like he’s already three steps ahead of whatever conversation you’re about to have with him.
It used to drive me insane when we were younger, and now is no different.
“You missed dinner,” I grunt, trying to keep a hold on the emotions bubbling up inside me, yet failing.
“I know.”
“I brought someone home.” I hold his gaze. “First time I've brought anyone here, ever. And you couldn’t come down for an hour.”
Rhys stares at me, not blinking, but the smallest tick in his jaw tells me it’s one of those rare occasions when he’s actually processing what I’m saying.
“I know,” he says again, only quieter this time.
“That’s all you’ve got?”
His head tilts to the side. “What do you want me to say, Zyran?”
“I want you to tell me why.”
Rhys blinks once, keeping his gaze on me the entire time, and it used to be arrogance when we were kids, but I know better now. It’s just how he protects himself, same as the rest of us, just a different method.
“It’s nothing personal,” he finally mutters, taking a sip of his coffee.
“It felt pretty damn personal.”
“Everything feels personal to you lately.”
My eyes twitch and I look at him standing there against the counter with his coffee and his unwashed hair and his eyes that are always somewhere between here and three other places. The frustration moves through me slow and hot, and I can feel my skin start to itch.
I step forward, hands fisted at my side, and Rhys watches me with a raised brow. “So what, you’re going to hit me now?”
“Sure,” I laugh, stopping in front of him. “If that means you’ll feel an ounce of what I’m feeling right now.”
He doesn’t move, just a simple raise of the chin, like he’s fully expecting me to punch him—I have just about half a mind to do it.
“I brought my girl home to meet my family. A girl that I love—” I swallow, shaking my head. “All to meet the family that I love, and you couldn’t walk downstairs to even say hello or show your face.”
Rhys goes still, but I don’t allow myself another second with him.
I turn around, knowing that if I keep standing there, trying to get him to understand where I was coming from, I’d end up punching him.
“Zyran—”
I ignore him and walk out of the kitchen and down to the door, not stopping until I push through the doors to the gym, letting it slam shut behind me. Only then do I stop, my back pressing against the door, and I realize what I said.
A girl I love.
I said it out loud, and it was to Rhys of all people.
The smell of rubber and cold air hits me with that familiar weight because in this room I can breathe. I stare up at the ceiling, trying to figure out when I realized I loved her, but nothing pinpoints a time.
I think about this morning in the truck; she was tired and worried about Oliver, though she was trying not to show it. Then last night in my room, she curled up at my side with her hand resting on my throat while I said things out loud that I haven’t talked to anyone about.
I love her.
I’ve probably loved her longer than I’ve known what to call it. Before the storm, before I was shot—since some version of me went to that coffee shop every morning and told myself it was a routine.
It was never a habit but a sick obsession that I was too weak to stop.
That’s the part I keep coming back to. I should probably feel some kind of way about the fact that I spent a year circling a woman and never speaking to her, never doing anything about it—just showing up and ordering coffee, which I hated, while I watched her move through her morning like she had no idea she was holding something of mine together just by existing.
And what’s even worse is that I’m not sorry.
I blow out a breath and walk towards the small station to wrap my hands, feeling that familiar motion slip over me as I think about what it means to love someone before you even know them.
Whether that’s even possible or whether I just loved the idea of her and then she turned out to be better than anything I’d imagined.
Esperr’s better.
She’s so much better than anything I had built inside my head every morning. She’s funnier, smarter, down to Earth and braver in ways she doesn’t give herself credit for. More broken in ways she’s only just starting to let me see.
I let the cold from the gym fuel me as I hit the bag harder, shifting my feet as I hit it over and over again. The chain swings, and I move over, punching it again. I let it all fall away—the pain of my nightmares that are clawing at me and Rhys.
By the time I finally step back to catch my breath, I’m drenched and my shoulders are burning, and the anger has subsided for now.
I stand there and blow out a breath, bending so my hands are resting on my knees. It takes a few minutes until I finally straighten up and head over to the fridge in the corner to grab some water.
Just as I get some, the gym door opens and I don’t have to look to know who it is. Rhys’s footsteps are lighter than anyone else’s, always have been, and he moves into the room, stopping somewhere behind me, not saying anything.
I swallow and tilt my head up. “Say what you came to say.”
Rhys doesn’t say anything right away, and that’s somehow worse than if he’d followed me down here in the first place. I know this silence; this has weight to it, like he’s been standing in the kitchen turning over what to say to me since I walked out.
I grab a towel from the stack next to the fridge and wipe my face, refusing to look at him.
“I heard you,” he finally mutters.
“Good.”
“Not just what you said to me,” he shuffles closer to me.
“I mean, I heard you last night, from upstairs.” He pauses, and this time I glance over my shoulder, raising a brow.
“I heard all of it—dinner, Cyran, and you fighting about how you didn’t tell them about her.
Even the way she laughed at something Sybil said in the living room. ”
I turn around completely and look at him.
He’s not quite looking at me, eyes scanning the floor, which means Rhys is telling the truth—he’s like the opposite of people who lie.
Others look at the floor when they aren’t being honest with you, but Rhys, he looks at the ground, like being vulnerable is the toughest thing he’s done.
“She has a good laugh,” he mumbles.
“Yeah.” I nod. “She does.”
He takes a deep breath, turning his mug in his hands even though it must be cold by now. “I should’ve come down. I–I know that. I knew it last night when I was sitting up there listening to everyone and telling myself it was fine.” He glances up, biting his lip. “It wasn’t fine.”
I hold his gaze, hiding the fact that I’m surprised. “No, it wasn’t.”
“I want to meet her… properly.”
I look at my brother standing there, hair still a disaster, holding his cold coffee that he’s still going to drink, and I think about how Rhys has always been the hardest one to reach, but that’s never once meant he didn’t care.
“Yeah, okay, we can do that.”
He nods once, glancing to the door like he’s seconds away from bolting because this is too much for him.
“And she knows what we—you—do?”
I nod, giving him a small smile.
“And you still trust her?”
“With my life.”
Rhys doesn’t say anything, just gives me one last look before he turns and walks out of the gym. The door swings shut behind him, and the room is quiet again, the only sound being my own breathing.
With my life.
Another thing I said without thinking, but I meant it, all the way down to my bones, to my soul. And it should terrify me, but it doesn’t.
I’ve trusted people with my life before in the professional sense—Slater, Raiden, Cyran, and even Rhys. In that warehouse, in dark hallways, and in situations where the margin for error was zero. And in that warehouse, I know it was Sybil and Cyran and Rhys that saved me.
But this is different.
It’s her sitting in my truck telling me Oliver never hangs up first and watching her face do that thing where she’s trying not to show me that she’s worried.
It’s her curled into my side last night, telling me she’s glad I’m here, into my chest like she needed to tell me that.
All the way to her standing in the kitchen at two in the morning, laughing at burned toast.
That’s not the same kind of trust.
It’s bigger.
Iplace the lid over the pan when Cyran walks in.